Stuff
UPDATE: As A Feminist Mom Seth MacFarlane Didn’t Offend Me, But The Onion Calling Quvenzhané A ‘Cu*t’ Did
There is so much outrage this morning all over the Internets about what a sexist dunderhead Seth MacFarlane was as host of the Oscars last night. We don’t live in a world, sadly, where we can have Amy Poehler and Tina Fey host everything. But to be honest with you, I think MacFarlane did a pretty decent job considering he was hosting the most important, sacred, revered night of the year, according to all of the fancy self-important Hollywood people. It can’t be an easy job. You have to sing. You have to make jokes. You have to go with the flow and deal with award winners going over their allotted time. I don’t think MacFarlane was the most amazing Oscar host, but I don’t take issue with so much of what it seems like everyone else is taking issue with.
The “We Saw Your Boobs” song. It took place after the watershed, so it wasn’t like people should be scandalized by the fact their toddlers saw it, because most kids of a certain age should have been in bed by that time anyway. The song was goofy, and dumb, but I feel like it made a very interesting point about women and women in film and how they are depicted. You may be an amazing, talented, award-winning actress, but at the end of the day, all a lot of the general public cares about is the fact we got to see your naked breasts at some point in your career. No one forced any of these women to take their tops off in these movies. They were well-compensated for it. Their “bravery” for stripping down was applauded. Seth was just pointing out a simple fact:  no matter how hard a woman works at a role and no matter how many awards she receives for her work, the general public still scours the internet for topless pics of her. We need more roles for women. We need more women directors, and more women screenwriters, and more stories about women told by women that hopefully don’t have a plot point that features a woman taking her shirt off. Sometimes an actor taking their top off is relevant to the story, but if we had more more women in Hollywood deciding if and when these cinematic moments were relevant, we could probably see a montage of male celebrities pretending to look offended as Melissa McCarthy sings a song featuring male actors entitled “You Dropped Your Trou” in the future.
